The Seven Good Years: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret
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The Seven Good Years: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret
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A brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller.The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life.What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There’s Lev’s insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever. This wise, witty memoir—Etgar’s first nonfiction book published in America, and told in his inimitable style—is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.
The Seven Good Years: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret - Amazon Sales Rank: #228524 in Books
- Brand: Keret, Etgar
- Published on: 2015-06-16
- Released on: 2015-06-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.60" h x .87" w x 5.80" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 192 pages
The Seven Good Years: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of June 2015: Etgar Keret is not your usual memoirist. For his first foray into the genre—he is the author of several lauded short story collections—Keret chose the titular Seven Good Years between the birth of his son and the death of his father as temporal boundaries for a series of four- to five-page vignettes and ruminations, ranging from humorous to anxious (but humorous) to heavy (and humorous). And for the most part, those events don’t even define the content of this collection. Keret—a native of Israel—contemplates moments of his life against a backdrop of constant conflict, casting an absurd light on both the monumental and mundane: a time-wasting game of chicken with a telemarketer becomes an irritating memento mori; the terrorist subtext of Angry Birds comes disturbingly (if somewhat speciously) clear; a whimsical mustache conjures a story of a near-fatal encounter in Lebanon. His compact style benefits the brevity of the pieces, perfectly matching his skewed and occasionally detached tone; Keret is a sort of bemused and sometimes baffled observer of the world and the people who inhabit it, and simply a wonderful writer. --Jon Foro
Review Praise for Etgar Keret:“Etgar Keret is a genius...” —New York Times "A brilliant writer...completely unlike any writer I know. The voice of the next generation." —Salman Rushdie “One of my favorite Israeli writers.” —John Green “Etgar’s stories are a reminder of that rude intangible that often goes unspoken in creative writing workshops: a great work of art is often just residual evidence of a great human soul. There is sweetheartedness and wisdom and eloquence and transcendence in his stories because these virtues exist in abundance in Etgar himself… I am very happy that Etgar and his work are in the world, making things better.” —George Saunders“I don’t know how Etgar Keret does it, but he can turn anything into a brilliant story. The Seven Good Years is full of them, and they happen to be true, and full of love, kindness, wisdom, humor and stuff I long for as a reader but cannot quite name. Keret’s writing is soul-healing.” —Aleksandar Hemon“At once funny and profound, The Seven Good Years is a gem. Etgar Keret approaches memoir the way he does fiction—from surprising angles, with a sly wit, and bracing frankness. Read him, and the world will never look the same again.” —Claire Messud“Being a father, having a father—Etgar Keret is the man in the middle and he captures the job just brilliantly.” —Roddy Doyle “Hilarious, brilliant, poignant, magically economical in its language, marvelously generous in its approach to the world, this book is like its author: genius.” —Ayelet Waldman “When I first read Etgar's stories, I wondered what was wrong with him—had his mother smoked crack while pregnant? Was he dropped on his head as an infant?—until I met him, and grew to know him, and realized his problem was much worse than I had ever imagined: he is a terribly caring human being in a terribly uncaring universe. Basically, he's fucked.” —Shalom Auslander "Etgar Keret is #1 writer in Israel and #2 in my heart (after my dachshund Felix).” —Gary Shteyngart “Etgar Keret’s stories are funny, with tons of feeling, driving towards destinations you never see coming. They’re written in the most unpretentious, chatty voice possible, but they’re also weirdly poetic. They stick in your gut. You think about them for days.” – Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life“If I could get you to read one writer, it would be Etgar Keret. His impossible blend of humor and tragedy, cynicism and empathy as well as big-hearted narratives that occupy the tiniest of page counts make him one of my favorites. Maybe one of yours.” —The Los Angeles Times “Exhilarating… For Keret, the creative impulse resides not in a conscious devotion to the classic armature of fiction (character, plot, theme, etc.) but in an allegiance to the anarchic instigations of the subconscious. His best stories display a kind of irrepressible dream logic.” —Steve Almond, New York Times “Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom.” – A.O. Scott, New York Times “[Keret’s writing] testifies to the power of the surreal, the concise and the fantastic… [O]blique, breezy, seriocomic fantasies that defy encapsulation, categorization and even summary.” —Washington Post “It's astonishing what he can do in just two pages: go from funny to bizarre to touching to satiric to meta to surprising and surreal… [A] master storyteller, creating deep, tragic, funny, painful tales with scarcely more words than you've read in this review.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times"Spare wry… Without overplaying any single aspect of a complicated life in complicated times in a complicated place, Keret’s lovely memoir retains its essential human warmth, demonstrating that with memoirs, less can often be more." – Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)"Clever, witty, and wise." —Esquire“Etgar Keret's The Seven Good Years examines the absurdity, fragility and unpredictability of life… in true Keret style, it promises to be both poignant and uproariously funny.” —Chicago Tribune“Keret’s unrivalled voice really shines, offering startling revelations, wry humor, and notes of grace…. [A] quiet dread sometimes seethes just beneath small moments, offbeat incidents, and strange dreams. Always on display is Keret’s astonishing capacity to transform even the pettiest of quotidian inconveniences (such as a delayed flight) into exuberant flights of fancy and realization. His voice is truly incomparable…. The Seven Good Years sparkles with humor and poignant wisdom, rendering wonderful immersions into Keret’s inner landscape, the gentle and deeply affecting ways that both strangers and loved ones stir his compassionate imagination.” – The Forward “Keret’s deadpan tales, collected in such books as “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door” (2012) and “The Girl on the Fridge” (2008), often blur the line between the real and the surreal… This unusual perspective makes Keret’s new autobiography especially intriguing… the book brings together his engagingly cockeyed observations on a variety of subjects, from his disparate family to run-ins with cabdrivers and pushy moms at the park.” —Washington Post“Keret calls it a memoir but it's really a TARDIS — a time machine that does two kinds of magic at once. First, it takes us back through seven years of Keret's history, showing us the world (its beauty, madness, and inescapable strangeness) through his sharp and sympathetic observations. It's not an overtly political book, but one defined by violence, bookended by life and death.” —NPR"It’s no surprise that The Seven Good Years – Etgar Keret’s first foray into non-fiction – is extraordinary. Imbued with all of its writer’s familiar innocence, cynicism, wonder, nuance and insight, these essays – spanning a period from the birth of his son to the death of his beloved father – are, like his stories, very short, deceptively accessible, and utterly brilliant. It is a rare three-page piece that can move a reader to tears, but Keret does it without effort, and brings unexpected tears of laughter a moment later. Fellow polymath Clive James has called him 'one of our most important writers alive,' and it’s no overstatement. For fans of his five best-selling short-story collections, this latest offering will be a delight; for new readers, I can’t think of a better entrée into Keret’s work" —Francesca Segal, Jewish Chronicle"[F]antastical, funny, and often heartbreaking." —The Rumpus“A bittersweet memoir… captures the time between the birth of his son to the death of his Holocaust survivor father, years of contentment punctuated by air-raid sirens and jam 'sour with memories.'” —Vogue.com “Reviewing Etgar Keret’s new volume of mini-memoirs poses something of a pleasant conundrum: What can you add to the reading world when you’ve just turned the final page of a book in which a writer has managed to say so much, so movingly, so concisely, and so entertainingly?...Keret brings the same surreal edge and black-as-pitch humor to these nonfictional musings as he does to his short stories… [His] writing exudes an intimate friendliness, as though he’s bantering with you, one-on-one.” —Boston Globe
About the Author Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A winner of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the author, most recently, of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections like The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many other publications, and on This American Life, where he is a regular contributor.
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Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful. Strong short essays from an extraordinary writer of short stories By J. A Magill Long a fan of Etgar Keret's distilled trippy fiction, I approached his memoir with some trepidation. Memoir is a very different animal after all, I wasn't sure his skills would translate. Yet while his fiction usually revolves around the fantastical -- the girlfriend who goes to sleep every night and wakes up a middle aged man, the suicide who serially haunts his circle of friends -- that obscures much of what makes his writing so powerful: Keret's keen eye and open heart. Those characteristics work well in this new work.In a certain sense, this is mislabeled as a memoir. "The Seven Good Years" would more accurately be described as a series of very short essays (for those unfamiliar with Keret, this is similar to his stories which usually run between 1-4 pages). While most of these essays focus on the birth and raising of his son, this short collection also includes musings on aging, airlines, the writing life, and humanities general oddness. Keret’s sparse prose carry a lot of punch in this format, but to paraphrase Twain, reality is always far messier than fiction. People, at least mostly, aren’t as neat as the characters conjured in the imagination. Moreover, as hard as Keret is on his own human frailties, he tends to be rather forgiving of others, which lends just a few of these essays a slightly syrupy after taste. On the flip side of Twain’s observation, most readers are far more forgiving of non-fiction; the pairing of the birth of Keret’s son with his father’s fatal illness might raise objections for being predictable in a story, but reads here as life’s tragic symmetry.The combination of that inclination towards self-criticism and that sharp eye make for a lot of really fun writing. He succeeds at putting into words our shared parental frustrations and absurdities. Scenes like Keret fighting with a surly cabdriver in front of his son and his son demanding that they apologize, or his musings on why his infant may be a sociopath make for a read that that is both amusing and familiar. And again, his examination of his mission as a writer comes across as particularly thoughtful. “The writer is neither saint nor tzadik nor prophet standing at the gate; he’s just another sinner who has somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe inconceivable reality of our world. He doesn’t invent a single feeling or thought – all of them existed long before him… he’s here, at our side, buried up to his neck in mud and filth.”While Keret’s essays may not awe readers with the power found in his fiction, they still shed more than their share of light.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful. Light Touch By Zoeeagleeye I find that as an older American whose tastes were formed by Steinbeck, Hemingway, McCullers, Kerouac, Salinger, Ellison, Thompson and Leibling -- to name but a few -- I don't appear to have the right sensibility to appreciate Etgar Keret. He feels "young" to me. Even the title of his "The Seven Good Years" is a rather superficial demarcation for the area of his prose. But I got the book mostly due to all the accolades on the cover, encomiums like "brilliant," "hilarious" and "master storyteller." I've yet to see it.While it is true that Keret's writing style flows with clarity and ease, I crave heavier content. He is writing about things as old as humankind, but puts no new face on them. But he does put a smaller, more personal covering on his topics, so that while his stories are certainly unique to him, we can only relate to him and them as pleasant, sometimes thoughtful portraits. But we are seldom moved by any profundity. And, yes, Keret's stories are full of emotion, but it is restrained, almost a casually "lite" emotion; nothing that shakes us to our depths.For example, there is a story about parents deciding whether or not their son will grow up to go into the Army, the agitation point being at what age will this decision be made. So we get a laid-back discussion between he and his wife (who is not named) and a reasonable exchange ensues. The chapter ends, "In the end, out of exhaustion, and in the absence of any other solution, we decided to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fourteen years working toward family and regional peace." In so many ways, this is no solution at all, yet it is laid down as the final brick in a mildly reasoned mental sojourn. Catharsis, climax, even foreshadowing, all seem to be missing.Perhaps I missed something in translation.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Keret is a writer with a keen eye for life's oddities and an ability to share his insights with humor and frank emotion By Bookreporter Though he's a bestselling author in his native Israel, Etgar Keret is hardly a household name among American readers. The publication of THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS, a memoir in essays, should help change that. The 36 pieces that comprise this pleasing book reveal a writer with a keen eye for life's oddities and an ability to share his insights with humor and frank emotion.The "seven good years" of the title are bookended by the birth of Keret's son, Lev, in a hospital simultaneously treating the victims of a terrorist attack, and the death of the author's father. As reflected in the story of Lev's birth, Keret is able to shift his focus effortlessly from the intimate details of family life to the wider world. All of the pieces range between three and six pages, but there's nothing monotonous about them, and their brevity permits no wasted words. "My wife says that I'm too nice, while I claim that she's just a very, very bad person" is the opening sentence of "Fare and Good," an essay describing their passionate debate over his practice of inviting cab drivers who need to use the bathroom up to their Tel Aviv apartment. "There's nothing like a few days in eastern Europe to bring out the Jew in you," Keret, the son of Holocaust survivors, writes in introducing his encounter with anti-Semitism in Germany and Hungary.Keret possesses the timing of a veteran standup comic, a skill essential to humor writing, which lacks the elements of voice or gesture the comedian can bring to bear on the stage. He's at his best in self-deprecating pieces like "Poser," where he describes how his rejection from a beginners yoga class led to his enrollment in a "special" group made up of "a bunch of women in advanced stages of pregnancy." "About three months after I joined the class," he writes, "all the members had given birth except me." He explains, in "Call and Response," how his "poor Grandma strategy," which "invokes a woman for whom I've arranged dozens of virtual burials in order to get out of futile conversations," morphs into his own fake death to avoid persistent calls from the satellite TV company.One needn't be Jewish or even familiar with life in Israel to appreciate Keret's default point of view --- that of a "stressed-out Jew who considers his momentary survival to be exceptional and not the least bit trivial" --- but anyone who is will find his writing especially appealing. His tone of absurdist realism aptly reflects life in a country whose existence often seems improbable and whose survival frequently has been imperiled.Only in Israel could Keret be drawn into a playground debate about whether he and his wife, Shira, will allow then-three-year-old Lev to perform his compulsory military service upon reaching age 18. That discussion sparks an argument that concludes with their decision "to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fifteen years working toward family and regional peace." His decision to grow a mustache at Lev's insistence leads him to share an implausible (everywhere except Israel) story, told by his acupuncturist, that begins by describing the role of a fake mustache in an undercover military mission. "Reality here is confusing enough as it is," he then confesses, in explaining his decision to remove his facial hair. Like many Israeli Jews, Keret is not religious ("Me, when it comes to religion, I have no G-d"), but his sister lives, with her 11 children, in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's most Orthodox neighborhood. In "My Lamented Sister," Keret expresses his dismay over her religious choice in the refrain, "Nineteen years ago, in a small wedding hall in Bnei Brak, my older sister died." By the end of the essay, he tells a gentle story that reveals how they've reached at least a tentative reconciliation.That essay demonstrates Keret's deftness in pivoting away from humor with no lessening in the quality of his work. "Shiva" recounts an incident that occurs while he observes the seven-day mourning period after his father's death. An ultra-Orthodox relative tells Keret a story about his nonreligious father's act of devotion that has an almost Talmudic quality. In "Jam," he describes the construction of the Keret House, a roughly four-foot-wide installation in Warsaw near the place where his mother's family lived in the Jewish ghetto in World War II. "And I feel that my mother and I have now fulfilled my grandfather's wish, and our name is alive again in the city where almost no trace of my family is left," he writes.While he never takes himself seriously, Etgar Keret views the writer's vocation with utmost gravity. "The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate;" he observes, "he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world." From what's revealed in the pages of THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS, Keret seriously underestimates himself.Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
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